Saturday, February 16, 2008

Democratic Voter Turnout Continues to Amaze

An epilogue to my previous post (where my initial rambling may have caused some to miss the punch line): Anyway, I have updated the tallies after the MD and VA primaries. In Maryland, Obama (the winner, with 464474 votes) himself received as many votes as were cast in all in the 2004 MD primary (464769 total votes cast). Virginia, of course, went ahead and topped that! In VA, this year’s losing candidate (Clinton, with 347252) received nearly as many votes as were cast in all in the 2004 primary (394720 total votes cast); Obama left all that in the dust with a hefty 623141 votes.

The 17 states I have tallied, to date, all had their primaries before or just after Super Tuesday in 2004. Therefore, there should have been maximum voter interest for these in 2004 (as the nomination was still up for grabs). For these 17 states, the tally comparison now stands as follows:

9,615,918 total votes cast in 2004;

17,343,476 total votes cast in 2008;

an increase of 80.4%.

But wait, there’s more. If you order right now, we’ll send you….oh sorry…different pitch…..but there is indeed more….according to at least this one source (I don’t know how credible it is, but I have had some trouble tracking down actual vote tallies from 2004), there were 16,535,823 total votes cast, nationwide, in the 2004 democratic primaries. The aforementioned 17 states have already surpassed that total by 807653 votes. Going by these numbers, it appears that over 25 million votes will be cast in the Democratic primaries this year.